THE EMPOWERING EXCITEMENT OF ‘SAFE SCARY’ BOOKS Image courtesy of Ally Malinenko. She is the author of “Ghost Girl” and “This Appearing House,” both middle-grade horror novels. Malinenko is no stranger to the scary side of the tracks. I couldn’t stop looking at them as a kid even if I wanted to look away.” “Also, the illustrations made my blood go cold. University of Pittsburgh alumnus and author Ally Malinenko remembers her own introduction to Schwartz’s books: “There are some very dark tales in those collections,” she says. But Schwartz’s collection of folk tales and urban myths is a gruesome winner full of ghosts and monsters and corpses that many kids will find fascinating - and scary in the best possible way. While that book is still a favorite, my son quickly graduated to the gateway horror tales of Alvin Schwartz’s “In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories.” This book, part of HarperCollins’ “I Can Read” series aimed at very young readers, features simple sentences and very few words with more than two syllables. It started two years ago with Eve Bunting’s delightfully chilling picture book, with art by Jan Brett, “Scary, Scary Halloween” (“I peer outside, there’s something there. The earnestness with which my son approaches every other aspect of our creepy celebrations also goes for the books we read together this time of year too. Growing up in the zombie capital of the world surely makes Halloween resonate a bit more. From yard decorations to trick-or-treating routes to costumes, he gives it all a lot of solemn consideration. My son takes this spooky season quite seriously. Me: Weren’t you a skeleton last Halloween? Me: Didn’t you tell me yesterday that you wanted to be a robot? A recent conversation with my son, who is 4 years old, went something like this:
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